Issue 1: Summer 2008

"IF YOU START THINKING ABOUT YOUR FILM BEING A SUCCESS, YOU'RE FUCKED": An Interview With Vivienne Dick

The following text is compiled from comments made during a public interview with Vivienne Dick after a screening of two of her most accomplished early films, She Had Her Gun All Ready (1978) and Beauty Becomes the Beast (1979), in Cork last November.

Born in Donegal in 1950, Dick began making films in late ‘70s New York. Displaying an obvious kinship with the then-current No Wave music scene, these early films are richly atmospheric collisions between free-form DIY aesthetics and appropriated fragments of melodramatic genre iconography and narrativity. These are collaged into often dazzling structures rightly compared by the filmmaker to free jazz- highly musical, but also with a documentary, or even essayistic edge. For all their playfulness, these films frequently turn dark in their constant engagement with gender issues.

Dick returned to Europe in the arly ‘80s, splitting her time between London and Ireland, a country she self-reflexively documented in the excellent mock-travelogue Visibility: Moderate (1981). In recent years, she has resided in Galway, teaching and occasionally making videos, notably the impressive three-screen installation Excluded by the Nature of Things (2002).

The focus of this interview is Beauty Becomes the Beast, a film nicely summarised by Amy Taubin:

"Beauty stars Lydia Lunch as an agonized downed-out woman of ambiguous age (anywhere between three and 23), trekking around from ocean front to East Village slum with her companion, a naked, eyeless, wrecked, wretched rubber baby doll, to a screaming soundtrack partially composed of Lunch singing with her group Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. She lolls on the bed with her cat, fights in front of the TV set, is beset with leering, grimacing, paranoid-freakout monsters who tell her, "Be dirty, sugar," and threaten to sew up her pussy. The rhythm of Dick's shooting and editing mimics her heroines' manic-depressive behavior, shifting mercurially from the horrific to the comedic and back again." (1)

New York, the late '70s.

If you were living in Ireland in the '60s.... I couldn't wait to get out of it! You'd die if you stayed here! I went to Paris, I went to London, I went to Germany... I was very 'jumpy'. I went to India, then I ended up in New York.

I'm very inspired by location and New York's so fantastic looking. Not that you see that much of New York in the film, mind you. It's just that steam coming up off the ground and the half-demolished buildings. We were broke and all these buildings were being demolished at the time and that's why we were all able to live there and make films... But the city was broke, so cheap rents! We were all able to live on part time jobs. You worked lunchtime and that was it! It was a fantastic time. And everyone else I knew around the place seemed to be doing that- just part-time jobs and then they were doing other things. At the moment in New York, everyone's busy making money to pay the rent. The rents are high so they don't have time to do anything else.

The Women's Movement started in the early '70s and it was after that, the late '70s. It was another thing that was happening, Where a woman, for example, could be sexual, could be however she wanted to be, could wear high heels, could wear make-up. That's all standard now but then, in the late '70s, that was quite tricky. You could be judged in a certain way by other women if you were sexual-looking, if you wore a short skirt, if you wore make-up. But it was a fantastic era because you could really dress up in whatever your thing was, whatever your fancy was. Because in second hand shops you could find anything, old records, old clothes....

People were dressing up all the time and pretending- and I was part of that! Pretending you were part of the '60s, the '50s. or whatever. You can see that in the films. All this thing about turning back into the other decades, which now is happening all the time, then it was the first time we were doing that. Like I had a friend who was obsessed with Georgy Girl and the whole late '60s thing. She had all these clothes and dressed up... Running down the street with this little hand bag, all made up, you know. That really fascinated me. I grew up in Donegal when Top of the Pops was happening in England and I was thinking "Jesus! Why am I not living in London?!" I'd be looking at my little black and white TV in Killybegs and just thinking "Why am I not in this world?!" Ready Steady Go!, Top of the Pops, I'd watch it every single week religiously. So in New York, I could pretend. I was dressing up in '60s stuff and running around in make-believe. People were doing other things, other people were digging into the '50s. It was dress-up time, So there was great material for filmmaking because you had all the clothes and all the bits'n'pieces and people dressed up their apartments in all stuff taken out of skips. It certainly wasn't Ikea anyway!

No Wave- The Film Scene

I saw stuff for the first time in New York when I went to Anthology Film Archives that fascinated me... I didn't really like structuralist film, although I do now. But I was really going for people like Jack Smith, Ron Rice, Taylor Mead, Marie Menken. People who were doing kind of playful stuff in New York with their friends... I liked Warhol films too. I was amazed. It was my first time seeing films that I didn't know existed, seeing that people would just make a film without having a huge big crew or cast. I'd never seen work like that before. The only stuff that I'd seen that was 'independent' would have been some Godard films and some Fassbinder films when I was living in Paris.

It was sort of a weird thing. This group of people... We found ourselves in the same room one evening in the middle of January. It was actually my birthday. And there was this moment when people started talking about making Super-8 work and I'd just met them for the first time. That was Scott and Beth B, Eric Mitchell and Tina L'Hotsky. And they were all going to use their friends as actors and I said "Yeah, yeah! That sounds great!" That was the first time I felt a kind of belonging to something.

Not that we worked together in a group, it wasn't like that. But there was something, an energy there and, as it turned out, these people were interested in the music scene, which I was as well. Because, before that, when I was hanging out in Millenium, which was the film workshop, people were very shy about their work. It wasn't very energetic. Millenium's brilliant, they show great work, but the workshop then wasn't terrifically happening or exciting.

But there was something else here with this group of people who were into the same music I was into. So the early films were very much tapping into and riding on top of that music scene. All the young bands that couldn't really play the instruments but were just out there anyway. There was an energy in it and we were doing the same thing. We were often actually using people who were in the bands, working with them. They were interested in the films. So there was a lot of crossover with the music scene.

There was a lot of the music in Beauty Becomes the Beast, like that recording of Gloomy Sunday by Lydia Lunch and James Chance. That's a great recording that no one's ever heard of since. And Teenage Jesus, that music at the start is so powerful still. That's not my film, that's the music

If you take the filmmakers in the period I was in, we're all quite different. We only had certain things in common- that we were there at the same time, that we were influenced by the music and we maybe shared equipment and actors and stuff like that. But I don't think my films were like any of those other films- that's kind of evident. Apart from there being this slight background of New York punk. But I feel a little uneasy if people call my films 'punk films' because I think they're a lot more than that. Well, I don't even know what that means actually! I'd be happier with the term 'No Wave' because that was the music I listened to.

Working Methods

Beauty Becomes the Beast was shot over a couple of months. Or maybe even more, three months. Just shooting off and on, when people were available. And then cutting it, putting it together. It was shot on Super-8 with sound, which doesn't exist anymore. Very basic. And awkward to cut as well, because the sound is 18 frames behind or in front of- I can't even remember!- the picture. You can't really fine cut it, you know... If you take a little nip off it and you've overdone it, you can't put it back on again because you were cutting the original. It was a risky cut!

It was very improvised. In one of those scenes, there's someone ordering something over the phone, telling someone to get the milk or whatever...Not a bit of bother if I was in the middle of making a film, you can hear this person on the soundtrack! He's talking to his boyfriend and he's saying "Don't forget the milk..." But I thought that was funny and just left it in. There's this other layer, you know what I mean? The film's being made, but there's other things happening as well all at the same time. I kind of like 'reality' seeping in. Like in She Had Her Gun All Ready, Lydia's in that room, sitting in that old wrecked chair fiddling with the TV and we had the microphone just dangling out of the window so there's loud traffic and bangs going on outside and sirens and stuff. I like that about Super-8, that the sound is really vibrant and alive whereas people working with 16mm, they control it, they filter it and cut it down so it's all rightly balanced. But with Super-8 it bursts out at you, you know, way out, out of control a bit. And things bang in there when you're recording that aren't supposed to be there. But somehow, sometimes, it's completely right in the film. It's like synchronicity or something... Very often there's a police siren there that comes in that's just perfect. You'd think I put it in but I didn't, it was just there on the soundtrack. I like that about Super-8, it's like it's out of control a bit.

Performers

I'm not very experienced at working with people who are professional actors. I'm more comfortable with people who are not actors. I'm attracted to people who have a certain kind of energy, a kind of intensity about them. But there's also people like Adele Bertei who's the girl who looks like a guy, with a leather jacket. She's so fantastic. Her and Janet Stein, the two of them were dancing- Janet in that dress and the beehive hairdo. I love filming people who are able to just kind of forget the camera's there.

I know that Lydia Lunch is a very powerful kind of person. She was nineteen when I met her, very young. She's well known and she's talked about it herself, but she was abused as a child. I didn't know that when I made this film with her. And she was really astonished that that was part of the film, she found that very... But we didn't talk about it. But it is there, without ever being discussed. It's implied somehow or other. She gave an awful lot of herself in that film. She's quite an extraordinary artist, she's had an amazing career and she's still performing. She recently performed in New York with her original band - Teenage Jesus -at the Knitting Factory. It was sold out months in advance.

Audience Reaction

When these films were shown, I put them on the projector. I was nervous that they would get damaged so I would never hand the print to anyone else. I was always totally unsure about how the films would be received, that's for sure. And in the beginning they were usually shown in a music venue between bands so it'd be a very loud, raucous audience. If they didn't like it, they'd soon tell you. You'd be standing right there and they'd be right at you, there wouldn't be a polite audience like this!

People really didn't know what to say about them. There were things written, of course. I mean Hoberman wrote a lot at the time. But I think people just didn't know what to make of them. But, at the same time, they touched people somehow. That was my impression.

The films come from locations, people, and ideas that I have. Things that I'm interested in like gender issues. And I took them around different places in America. I think some men in the audiences in places like the Midwest sometimes felt threatened by some of these films. Partly because I had a lot of women in the films. The focus was on women. They weren't necessarily anti-men or anything like that, but I was really foregrounding women and they were the main characters. And that was very deliberate and very conscious on my part. I just felt so sick of all my life seeing the main person who does anything is always a guy. And the women are just fainting or handing him a gun or getting raped or murdered or whatever. And that's what I was wanting to correct. And all the other people in those films, like Pat Place, Lydia, Adele, Janet, Nan - these were all very strong women who were artists themselves. I cannot describe how it felt to see women have their own bands, play guitar or drums. This was new. I mean, Maureen Tucker was the drummer in Velvet Underground. How rare was that! WE were very conscious that we were now living in a new era, a new time when women were doing films and writing songs and wanting to make our own voices heard.

Then and Now

Everything matters- your age, the context, the time period you're in... Obviously, if a film's going to be made now by me or anyone else, it's going to be influenced by all these different factors. I've learnt so much more since about this or that or whatever, but there's something about those early films when I look at them now that I wish I could tap into again which is a trust in the process. That I could think I had nothing to lose, that there was nobody looking over my shoulder. It was a little bit like free jazz, where you just go for it. And I wish and hope and pray that that comes back to me, that I'm able to do that again and that I have that trust again before I die. Because I think it's great. It's the only thing, it really is.

I've been teaching a lot and I've been telling myself I want to get back into making films. I've been just doing a couple of shorts and some installation stuff, working with multiple screens. I'm trying to figure out if I can make films in Ireland. I would love to be able to make work here but something has to trigger it.

There's all the encouragement in the world in Ireland at the moment, it's incredibly supportive in a way it has never been before. I think you can make films anywhere, really, if you get away from focusing on your film being a success. If you start thinking about your film being a success, you're fucked. You've just got to make the film, you know. What it is you are driven to do, you just got to do it instead of talking or thinking about it.

To read more on Vivienne Dick's work, visit:

http://www.luxonline.org.uk/artists/vivienne_dick/index.html